Enter The Void

It’s a matter of life after death in Gaspar Noé’s latest, a film which interweaves afterlife themes with images of Tokyo’s nightlife, in telling the story of a brother and sister who won’t be parted. Emma Rowley is dazzled, uplifted and ultimately let down.

Gaspar Noé was in Leicester Square to introduce his hallucinatory picture. He noted that his journey towards making the film began in his teens, with his first experimentation with weed and acid and his subsequent consternation at the fact that these experiences were not adequately reflected in film. He also gave a hint as to the meaning of the film’s final frames, without which we might have missed a pretty vital point.

One thing is certain, Enter The Void is unlike anything we’ve seen before. Its languorous exploration of drugged-out visual phenomena – in the form of blooming geometric patterns, like fractals, flowers, fire, traces, tendrils – provides a virtuoso cinematographic sequence in the film’s opening minutes. While some commentators have dismissed it as merely ‘trippy’, it’s a genuinely magical look at one facet of human experience.

Still, at 161 minutes, Enter The Void is quite the epic. And after some time, it begins to transform into an audio and visual assault on the senses that – unleavened by a great deal of conventional plot or character development – will leave many viewers suffering from migraine and disappointment. But does Noé really intend his audience to enjoy his films? As with Irréversible, his intention is perhaps to draw us into an experience that’ll leave us reeling. (A graphic abortion scene and its aftermath strengthens this conclusion.)

The story begins like this. Oscar is a young American living in Tokyo, who has fallen into a lifestyle of dealing and taking drugs. After a visit from his sister, he settles down to smoke a pipe of DMT. He is disturbed by a phone call from a friend who asks him to meet up at a club called The Void, to deliver his drugs. Oscar arrives, only to find that the police have been tipped off. He rushes to a bathroom stall to dispose of his bag of pills and, trying to buy himself a little more time to flush the offending substances, unwisely yells out that he has a gun. A policeman shoots him through the door, into the gut, and that’s it for Oscar. Except that it’s not. His spirit hovers over his body and eventually floats out over the city to find his sister. From this point on, Oscar’s soul undergoes three stages of experience which lead him back to rebirth. The stages roughly correspond to the bardos of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (which, in a pretty thumping bit of thematic exposition, a friend has handily lent to Oscar before his untimely demise) – his experience of death, his experiences of the reality of his own life, and his movement towards rebirth.

So, in flashback form, we see the events that led Oscar to his demise, find out who shopped him and uncover the history behind his promise never to abandon his sister. This section of the film is extremely moving and immediate, particularly since we experience much of it from a first-person perspective. (Before his death, we see through Oscar’s eyes; after death, Oscar’s head and shoulders are front and centre in flashbacks, as though we are standing behind him.)

But although there is no shortage of neon-lit Tokyo hangouts to film, there is a limit to the amount of drifting camerawork the average person can enjoy. After two and a quarter hours, the characters and their backstories have been sufficiently explored, but there’s still another half an hour to go. The final sequence proves to be the weakest, and the cinema was filled with the sounds of rustling, giggling and fidgeting. The director had obviously lost his audience and a conclusion that should have been an epiphany missed its mark and slid into bathos. Further to this, had we not been tipped off to watch the conclusion very closely by the director himself, its implications may well have passed us by, and the ending dismissed as incredibly trite.

In a sense, it’s an everyman story, much greater than its characters. Noé has given us a modern retelling of a timeless myth of life and afterlife. Oscar is a speck, a spirit, a nobody, better off than many, less useful than most. His journey is representative of everyone's and following it is an experience not to be missed.

(Disclaimer: the star rating we’re giving this film reflects its unusual highs, not its trying pace or disappointing conclusion. We appreciate that this is a bit irregular but then, so is the film.)

Rating on a scale of 5 ghostly journeys: 4

Release date: No release date set
Directed by: Gaspar Noé
Written by: Gaspar Noé
Cast: Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta, Cyril Roy, Emily Alyn Lind, Jesse Kuhn, Olly Alexander, Masato Tanno
Rating: Unrated (18)
Running time: 161 minutes